Big Bikes

And Justice For Some

Every day I commute to work by bike, every day at least three incidents occur which completely piss me off, usually two of these are life threatening. I take a deep breath every morning and get on my bike with a positive mental attitude, within a few minutes a motorist has done something stupid or insane and my PMA (Bad Brains-speak, not Myspace acronym jibberish)is completely blown. By the third such incident I am a fire-breathing hell-monkey. But that's beside the point.
This morning I was ten minutes into the ride on Huron Ave. where are there many residential side streets opening up onto a kind of main drag. Often (very) folks come jamming out of this streets, not really wanting to stop at the stop sign at the end. Sometimes (not often) they see me and come to a screeching halt, other times they blaze into my path causing me to swerve to the center line and tap their window. Invariably they scream at me and flip me off because I am obviously a bad person doing bad things and breaking laws. This very thing happened this AM, but in a pretty extreme manner, this woman came flying up to the stop sign, I anticipated that there was no chance she was stopping, I swerved wide, gave her a bit of reprimand (understatement), and hoped to catch her at the light and realy let loose. This turned out to be unnecessary as Cambridge cop in a Bronco came careening out of the street behind her. No way, I thought, he can't possibly be about to pull this person over, not in my world, but he did.
Instead of hollering bloody murder at her all I had to to do at this point to make her week suck more was to give her a thumbs up and smile as I rode past. I found all of this so awesome, I was happy riding into a brutal headwind all the way to work.
Justice.